Monday Miscellany

Monday Miscellany

I’ll be traveling for the next three weeks. Therefore, updates here will be sparse. The 9 Best Books That Don’t Exist From Publishers Weekly: It’s time to make you really sad: here are 9 great books…that don’t actually exist. But while the world would certainly be a better place if they did exist (except #4 […]

Monday Miscellany Read More »

Monday Miscellany

The Bestselling Books of 2013 Publishers Weekly has gathered some interesting statistics about last year’s book sales. Among their findings: “fiction is the genre of choice for customers who read e-books” and movie adaptations created demand for several titles, including Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. See the books

Monday Miscellany Read More »

Monday Miscellany

Writing ‘Rudolph’: The Original Red-Nosed Manuscript From NPR comes a delightful tale of how Rudolph, the red-nosed reindeer, came to be, first in a story, then in a song, and finally in a movie. Sherlock Holmes stories enter public domain in U.S. A federal judge has issued a declarative judgment stating that Holmes, Dr. John

Monday Miscellany Read More »

Monday Miscellany: More Best Books Lists

The Best Books of 2013 Book-selling giant Amazon of course has lots of best books lists. Check out these categories: Editors’ Top 20 Picks Top 20 Customer Favorites arts & photography audiobooks biographies & memoirs business & investing children’s books comics & graphic novels cookbooks & food writing crafts, home, & garden gift picks history

Monday Miscellany: More Best Books Lists Read More »

Monday Miscellany: Best Books Round-Up

The lists of best books for 2013 are accumulating quickly. Here are some that I’ve found so far. The 10 Best Books of 2013 Courtesy of The New York Times, the five best works of fiction and of nonfiction. Best Books of 2013 Goodreads readers have spoken. See their top choices for the year in

Monday Miscellany: Best Books Round-Up Read More »

Monday Miscellany

Robert McCloskey Sketches for “Make Way for Ducklings” Born in 1914 in Hamilton, Ohio, Robert McCloskey came to Boston to attend the now-defunct Vesper George Art School. He left to live in New York for a time and established a career as an author and illustrator in the late 1930s. Over the years, he became

Monday Miscellany Read More »

Monday Miscellany: Big Literary News Edition

Meet Alice Munro, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature The big literary news of last week was the announcement of Canadian writer Alice Munro as recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Munro is generally considered to be the current master of the short-fiction form. The announcement generated a lot of articles about Munro’s

Monday Miscellany: Big Literary News Edition Read More »

Monday Miscellany

10 Impressive Uses of Borrowed Characters in Literature Kim Newman, whose latest book, Johnny Alucard, is out now, tells us: “In the Anno Dracula series, I’ve made use not only of characters and situations appropriated from Bram Stoker’s novel but a host of other preexisting fictional folk to populate the next-door-but-one world where Dracula defeated Van Helsing and

Monday Miscellany Read More »

Monday Miscellany

Why GR’s new review rules are censorship – Some thoughts Late Friday (US time) Goodreads announced a change in review and shelving policy, and immediately started deleting readers’ reviews and shelves. In doing this they became censors. Limiting readers’ ability to discuss the cultural context of a book is censorship designed to promote authors’ interests.

Monday Miscellany Read More »

Monday Miscellany

11 Required Reading Books You Should Re-Read Now That You’re Older Madeleine Crum thinks you’d benefit from rereading these books that you were probably required to struggle through in English classes while growing up. I have actually reread several of these in recent years, and I agree with her assessment that they have much more

Monday Miscellany Read More »

Scroll to Top